Why do we want an email list builder like AWeber?

A person’s email is the most precious item we can gather on the Internet.  Behind every “real person’s email” is a human being who may be interested or know someone who is interested in the material we are writing, selling or giving away.

This is the same reason why blackhat marketers will steal your email address only to spam you with messages.  They are using the law of numbers (they send emails to thousands hoping for that remote chance that someone might read it).

Think about an e-mail list of 300,000 – sending 1 message that sells a product with an open rate of say, 1% (just an example).  That’s 3,000 people that opened the email.  That’s a lot of people.  If the e-mail were selling a product, a certain percentage of that 3,000 would convert.  Seems like hard work but consider that someone was sitting on a computer clicking on a button…what did that action really cost them?  Not much, really.

Anyhow, building a list by asking people to voluntarily give it their emails to you – the attraction method – is what services like AWeber are all about.
Successful Internet Marketers swear by this method.  They have used it themselves to gain their reputation and make their money.

How does this work?

By providing value to people who need the information you are teaching, you exchange value for value.  Your valuable content for someone’s valuable E-Mail Address.

What is an Opt-In?

Opt-In is the action a website visitor takes when they type their First Name and E-Mail Address on the Subscription Box.  For example, ours is a box on the top right hand corner of our website.

We also have a similar subscription box on a page that gives away our Special Report:  “The 5 Essentials of a Kick-Ass Website“, what a website owner needs to be paying attention to – besides making their websites look pretty.

What is a Double Opt-In?

This is the action your new subscriber has to take to Confirm that it was really them who wanted your information, not some robot program that is running a macro typing email addresses.  This is the strictest method that will guarantee your Email List is actually populated by real people.

The AWeber default is actually a Double Opt-In.  You will have to manually set it to Single Opt-In if you do not want this option.

1. You don’t need to send an electronic invoice to someone (a simple PDF invoice will work) – and she is willing to pay you through this method.
2. You are not using a shopping cart.  You are simply sending money.
3. You are sending money to friends and family and they don’t want the 3.5% fee to reduce the money they are receiving from you.

Two requirements in order to be able to do this are:  a)  You both have a Paypal account  b)  The money you are sending must already be in your Paypal account.

STEP One: Login to your Paypal account and click on the Send Money Tab

STEP Two: Make sure you are using the Personal Tab which looks like the screen shot below.

<— Click on the image on the left when you are ready to buy.  This will take you to the Wishlist Member website.

When you get there, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page where it says Select The Option That’s Right For You, and click either ”Single Site License” or Multiple Site License (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Sign-up buttons at the bottom of the Wishlist Member website.

Features Include: 

Unlimited Membership Levels
Your membership site can have as many “levels” as you want. So if you want “Silver”, “Gold” and “Platinum”, you can! Now you can charge more for a higher level of access – all within the same blog.   

Flexible Membership Options
WishList Member gives you the ability to create Free, Trial or Paid membership levels (and any combination of all three).   

  Sequential Content Delivery
Depending on your setup, you may want to graduate your members from one level to the next. For example, members start at “Module 1″ and after 30 days they are automatically upgraded to “Module 2″. That’s what the Sequential Content Delivery system is for.   

Control Viewed Content
If you don’t want your members to see content they don’t have access to, just click the “Hide” button. This works REALLY well if you have a “modular” membership and only want people in “Module 1″ to see “Module 1″ and not “Module 2,3,4,5″ etc.   

Shopping Cart Integration
WishList Member seamlessly integrates with the most popular shopping cart systems including PayPal, ClickBank, and many more. Plus, WishList Member now has total integration with Cydec and Infusion.   

Easy Member Management
At a glance you can see your members, their registration status, membership level and much more. It’s also a snap to upgrade members, move them to different levels, “pause” their membership or delete them entirely.   

Multi-Level Access
WishList Member can go beyond just a membership site as you can easily give your members access to multiple levels within your membership (this works well if you’d like to create a central download location).   

Total Content Protection
WishList Member gives you the ability to determine exactly what your members can access. You can even drill down and grant access to specific posts, pages, categories and comments for each membership level. The possibilities are endless!   

Subscription Length Control
With this feature you can control the length of time each member has access to your membership site. Now you can automatically expire a membership after 3 days, 7 days or whatever time period you want.   

Custom Error Pages
When a person tries to access content they don’t have permission to view, they will be taken to an error page. Now you can determine what that page will be. This gives you the chance to encourage them to register or upgrade to a different membership level.   

Partial Content Display
Let’s say you want the majority of a post to be displayed for non-members except for one sentence. With the Partial Content Display feature you can hide that “secret sentence” so that it only displays the “secret sentence” for your members. It’s very cool.

We have recently sent out our email campaigns to all the people we’ve met who has given us their business cards – from a networking event. The software we chose to use for this project is called SendBlaster. This software only runs on Windows at this time, but it has been popular to many entrepreneurs who use the internet to build their email lists.

We have collected plenty of business cards from the networking events, so to make entering the contact information of the people we’ve talked to, we decided to use CardScan Executive business card scanner.  This neat USB device scans cards rapidly, and has a very good OCR software for translating the scanned image into text and storing them in a database.  I used the software to export the data to an Excel CSV (comma-delimited text) file.  I then cleaned up the exported data to make sure I have the right columns – names and email addresses, for me to be able to run our email campaigns.

When that was complete, I fire up Sendblaster, and import the data into a list.  Then I took the content for the email that Susan gave me, and composed our email message. It was important for us to be able to measure the results of our email campaign, so we chose to integrate TrackReport, which is an email tracking and analysis service that hooks up with Sendblaster.

Track Report is an email tracking/analysis reporting service that is currently in beta.  The service offers a credit for 50,000 events (emails sent) for users of the free and paid version of SendBlaster. Both Senblaster and Track Report companies, I believe, are located in Italy.  The grammar on their websites are not proper.  At first we were having a hard time signing up for an account on TrackReport. We thought we had to pay for Sendblaster Pro in order to get the 50,000 credit, because it would not let us create an account.

Then when I was browsing Sendblaster’s website, I found a live chat, and started asking their tech support some questions.  Track Report was not giving me any specific reasons why my sign-up attempt was failing.  Through persistence in “hacking” the sign up form, I figured out that the password field on their sign-up form only allowed alphanumeric characters (characters and numbers only). I was choosing a password that had a special character in it, and the page was rejecting it, but their program didn’t give an error message to let me know that it prohibits me from entering special characters (@#$%^&).  Finally when I entered an alphanumeric password , it allowed me to continue creating my account.

So the next day, I was ready to send the emails. In Sendblaster, setting up the SMTP email to our email server was easy.  I added the sender email address and name and our SMTP mail server info, and it accepted the settings.  Sendblaster has a feature for managing subscriptions / unsubscribes, where you enter your SMTP email info. Unfortunately, Hostgator did not allow us to use their server with mass mailing programs like Sendblaster. So I used a Gmail account, and that worked.

That was just me testing all the features of Sendblaster.  At Marblesoft, we use Aweber to manage our opt-in subscriptions.

We were evaluating SendBlaster – the free version, which is limited to only sending out 100 emails per batch. Our initial run was 230 emails, so I sent the first 100,  export a log of emails sent, and then go back to manage my list, and uncheck the first 100 emails, so I can send the next 100 emails. This is quite tedious once our list grows. By then we will be upgrading to the Sendblaster Pro version, which allows an unlimited number of emails.

Although Sendblaster comes with a lot of templates for creating HTML email, I was not too fond of the free templates.  As a WordPress designer who creates themes, I knew I can create my own templates.  To save time, however, I picked the simplest template that would allow me to drop our company logo and Susan’s picture, and put merge tags on the email body.  To comply with US CAN-SPAM law, we added an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.

Then my final step was to add the Track Report tracking code to the email. One thing to remember before you send out your blast is to save your finished email message to disk, and make sure the message is loaded, in case you closed the program. I made a mistake of loading a message from history, and that snapshot didn’t have my tracking code. I didn’t realize this until the first 100 emails went out.

Another lesson I learned – it is unfortunate that Sendblaster will not check whether you have a message loaded to send to your list. It will actually send blank emails if you forget to load the message. So I learn the hard way – through making a mistake. Fortunately, my instinct told me to abort after 20 emails to check if there was a message loaded. Sure enough, it was empty.  Too bad the software doesn’t check for me – I had to be smarter than this software tool and be on top of things. But other than these idiosyncrasies, the software is easy to use.

The good news is that after sending out our emails, we are able to track how many are opened, read and who clicked through.   When they clicked through, it took them to our Special Report landing page, where they get to sign up to receive the Special Report.  We have increased our subscribers and now have started building our list.  This is exciting because we are now reaching our target audience, and we are beginning to see measurable results.

One of the reasons we use it, is a new feature called Track Report.  Track Report is an Email Analytics service.

What does Track Report track?

• Sent and read e-mails: it tells if each email has been read or if each email has been sent but not read
• Read and clicked e-mails: data refers to opened email messages only, and show how many of them were just read but not clicked and how many of them were clicked.
• Views and clicks: each one of your emailings will have its own unique ROI rate, views and clicks data. Looking at views data we understand when one of our emailings got read for more than one time per each single reader.
• Unique clicks: we know the exact number of people that read our emails. Knowing the emailing’s unique clicks will be mandatory to understand the emailing’s ROI.
• Repeated clicks: a repeated click on one of our email marketing email message testify a user’s interest rate about what we spoke about in our emailings and will help us understanding the best subjects, styles and ways to compose the next email marketing campaings.
• E-mail contacts tracking: It shows who opened your email message and who clicked on links.

Read Ed’s Excellent Adventures with SendBlaster to get more details on how this is done.

“99% of Webmasters don’t need costly website optimization and submission services. Interestingly, 99% of “Search Engine Professionals” don’t mention this — they’re too interested in charging you for their services. “

Quoted from DIY Website Promotion (Robert Woodhead).

I like his style because he’s a software geek.  Geeks like to tell you the black and white truth about most everything technological.

Most of the time we don’t even know how to charge you for the knowledge we have because for most of us,  it’s a lifelong passion.  We don’t easily equate that with money.

So take note of how he’s monetizing his site.  He’s using the Tipping Method.

Anyhow, read his stuff, it’s informative.  Here’s the link:  http://selfpromotion.com/

If you look at it from the context of Google’s mission which is providing “unique, relevant content related to the search term”  you might understand why they have to downgrade a site’s rankings and even worse although rarely, not show it at all.

This blog post by Clickbank does a fine job of explaining the Google Slap.

The two most important rules include:

1. having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and
2. a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

A good book to read on e-mailing as a means of selling is Stephan Schiffman’s book “E-Mail Selling Techniques (That Really Work)”.  Page 29 of his book has a useful and concise summary about this topic:

Ten Things You Should Know About CAN-SPAM

1. CAN-SPAM applies only to commercial e-mail.
2. CAN-SPAM applies to e-mail for which a primary purpose is to feature your goods, services, or content even if you do not send the e-mail yourself; however…
3. CAN-SPAM does not apply to third-party advertisers who advertise in your mailings.
4. CAN-SPAM can apply to e-mail sent out by your affiliates on your behalf; however…
5. CAN-SPAM will not apply to e-mail sent out by your affiliates on your behalf unless you know, or should know, that the e-mail is being sent in violation of CAN-SPAM and you stand to gain from it financially, and you don’t try to stop it.
6. CAN-SPAM requires that all information in your e-mail headers and body be true, accurate and not misleading.
7. CAN-SPAM requires you to provide a fully functioning means of return Internet-based communication for the purpose of the recipient opting-out of your mailings.
8. CAN-SPAM requires you to honor those opt-out requests, and to immediately cease sharing the user’s address even with previously agreed-to partners.
9. CAN-SPAM does not require that you use confirmed opt-in for your mailings; however, it is one of the best defenses against an accusation of CAN-SPAM violation.
10. CAN-SPAM does not require ISPs to accept e-mail that is CAN-SPAM compliant.  In fact, ISPs are specifically exempted from claims that they must accept e-mail if it complies with CAN-SPAM.

Gray Areas (also known as areas where you may not know that could get you in trouble)

AWeber, Constant Contact and other mailing list builders most likely will not let you broadcast to a list that is not subscribed to you.  You can call them and argue that after all, it is your list which you collected personally but they will stick to their rules.

For example, Constant Contact will disable your account if you try do this.  You will need to contact them to unlock it.  How do we know?  <grin>

You will not be able to do a broadcast to a list you already own – outside of the list builder service -  until the people on your list agree to Opt-In to you using their provided widget.

How to get around this limitation?

Ask your people to subscribe to you.  It’s not the easiest solution but it can get the job done.

If you want to send out an “email blast” to a list you already own that have not subscribed to you, you can read this article about SendBlaster.

Click here to get an AWeber account.

Aweber is a paid service that allows you to set up an opt-in box (like the one we have on the upper right corner of this page). This tool will help you collect and manage your list of email addresses from people who visit and subscribe to your website. Aweber brands itself as an email marketing software, email newsletters, and autoresponder service. Its pricing starts at $19.95 a month. Once you sign up for an account, you can set up your lists, and create your email campaigns or newsletters.

The Aweber service comes with sign-up form templates that you can use on your website or send out in your email newsletters. This saves you from having to pay someone to design them for you. Click here to get an Aweber account.

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Mailchimp is a new email list manager that is gaining popularity with the WordPress crowd.  It’s actually free up to 500 subscribers.  It is a nice widget to start with when you are on a budget and you are not looking for anything fancy with your email newsletters.  However, unlike Aweber, Mailchimp only comes with a grey (bland) sign up form. Also, the code they provided to add to a web or landing page was so convoluted! It gave us a headache when we tried to figure out how to modify and use the sign-up form (we are a fan of clean code).  So unless you are up for tweaking XHTML and CSS code to make a decent looking sign-up forms, we recommend that you pay for AWeber instead.

Here are two tips for building an effective keyword list:

Think like a customer. What terms or phrases would your customers use to describe your products or services? List any keywords that you think users might search for on Google to find your business. Then expand your list to include relevant variations including alternate spellings (e.g. light, lite), plurals, and synonyms.

Refine your keyword list. Keywords that are too broad can lower your performance by generating many ad impressions but few clicks. For example, using the generic keyword bags to promote luggage goods could show your ad to users searching for unrelated items like tea bags and vacuum bags. To make your keywords more specific, add words that are descriptive of your goods or services. Instead of using the keyword bags, try more relevant and descriptive keywords like luggage bags, carry-on travel bags, and buy luggage online.